The Life I Could of Had

On the way into the office this morning there was a guy on the radio talking about the life that he could have had and suggesting that it is good mental exercise to write down the story that might have been created by you.

The display on my car stereo is broken and I didn't listen to it long enough to get their call letters, but I thought about it for a few minutes and decided to play with it. Even though I am a dreamer I try not to spend too much time looking backwards because I always want to move forward.

This is kind of a variation of the meme that the Shmata Queen had going on earlier. Initially I hadn't planned on doing any more blogging at all today as I brought work home with me. I wasn't real happy about that because I have a desire to work on Fragments of Fiction. It needs more tending to as there are a number of issues with it, but since I am a good boy I opted to try and get ahead of things.

I have an early morning dentist appointment. I hate going to the dentist and I can guarantee that it will set me back so I tried to do the right thing and get ahead. No go. The @^#$@$^@$%^ program that I need to use is not working. Those jackasses irritate me because it is clear that they have never actually used the program they wrote, it is not intuitive and it doesn't work well. So I suppose that this is a good launching point for the main theme of the post.

The life that I could have had. It sounds so dramatic and so filled with regret. There is something so sad to that and yet there is a positive side too because it allows us to look at the things/people that could have been a part of our lives that we are happy are not.

So in brief here are a couple of paths that I could have taken that would have led me on journeys to places that I cannot imagine.

I have had several great loves in my life and there is one that from time to time still hurts because it is the itch that I never scratched. It is the path that makes me wonder more than others because there is something there that is missing elsewhere.

I was supposed to spend my freshman year of college in Israel. I had plans to do it during my junior year and then again after college I explored/investigated the idea/opportunity.

At different junctures in my life I planned on making aliyah and prepared myself for the time I knew that I would have to serve in Israel in the IDF. I remember thinking about it at 16, at 20 and then again at 25 and each time I remember thinking that if necessary I could be like Trumpeldor.

In between all of this I wrestled with what I was going to do when I grew up. I went from sports writer, to lawyer, to teacher, to marketing professional to camp director.

I fell in love with different women. One became religious and encouraged me to follow. Other friends had gone BT and I considered it. There were things that I found very attractive but I was unwilling to take on more observance strictly to pursue someone, it didn't feel honest.

Strangely enough a few years later I found myself contemplating time in yeshiva and mulled over the idea for a while. The time wasn't right and I didn't move ahead but I wouldn't be surprised if at some time it happened.

The girl from high school told me early in our college careers that if we continued dating she was certain that we would get married and I told her that I didn't see that happening. Needless to say we eventually went our separate ways. She got married at a relatively young age and then ended up divorced about six or seven years later with two kids. Now she is remarried and living in the Pacific Northwest.

There were other loves and other flirtations with this and that. I have tried to write more and tried to put more into this, but I can't seem to make it work. What I take that to mean is that like I said, I can't spend too much time living in the past. There are some awfully good memories and there are some bad ones too, but I really am much too interested on making new memories to spend any more time here.